On Friday, March 22, gunmen toting assault rifles stormed Crocus City Hall, west of Moscow in the Krasnogorsk district, shot the guards and, as graphic videos show, opened fire on the concert audience without restraint. More than 6,000 tickets had been sold for the performance by the famed Russian rock band Piknik. At least 137 people were killed and many more wounded, some critically; the final death tally could be higher. That even more people were not shot may owe to the perpetrators’ plan to decamp before Russian security forces arrived on the scene. In a move that seemed calculated to maximize the terror, generate publicity, and broadcast the Russian government’s ineptitude, the assailants set parts of the building ablaze. According to some reports, 90 minutes elapsed before Russian special forces arrived. Putin waited until Saturday afternoon before addressing the Russian people in a televised address. By then, an offshoot of the Islamic State, Islamic State–Khorasan (IS-K), had already claimed responsibility.
The attack reverberated through Russian society, but also rattled the government, which was caught unaware and unprepared. For Putin, the attack came at a particularly bad time. He had been basking in his recent electoral victory—no surprise, since any candidate with even a slight chance to garner votes of a meaningful magnitude had been declared ineligible to run—and talking up the Russian army’s capture of the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka and its grinding westward advance. Putin has always presented himself as a leader to whom Russians can confidently entrust their safety. Yet even before the attack by IS-K, that image had been tarnished by Ukrainian drone attacks on more than a dozen of Russia’s 44 oil refineries and incursions into provinces adjacent to the Russia–Ukraine border by anti-Putin insurgents, both of which brought the war into Russian daily life. Furthermore, on March 16, while the Russian presidential election was still underway, Ukrainian missile attacks forced the governor of Belgorod province to order the closing of schools and shopping centers for two days. But those embarrassments and failures were nothing compared to the Crocus City Hall massacre, the most spectacular attack on Russian territory in nearly twenty years. (The two worst attacks in Russia before this one occurred at a school in Beslan, North Ossetia in 2004 and at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater in 2002. More than 330 people died in the Beslan attack and at least 130 in Moscow; both were perpetrated by Chechen militants.)
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